Posted on 06/07/2003 5:25:57 PM PDT by blam
Invite us to UK say Saddam's two daughters
By Philip Sherwell in Baghdad
(Filed: 08/06/2003)
The eldest daughter of Saddam Hussein has broken her silence to tell The Telegraph that she and her sister have no plans to seek asylum in Britain, as it would not be "appropriate".
Raghad Saddam Hussein, who remains in hiding in Iraq with her sister, Rana, said they might, however, move to Britain if they were granted visas.
Last week their cousin, Izzi-Din Hassan al-Majid, who lives in exile in Leeds, told a newspaper that the sisters wanted to apply for asylum in Britain. Making her first comments to the Western media, Raghad explained that their plans had been misunderstood.
Raghad Saddam Hussein with her sister Rana [left] "We do not want to apply for asylum as that would not be appropriate for us," she said. "But we would like to visit Britain and possibly live there if we were granted visas."
Raghad and Rana had been estranged from their father since their husbands were murdered on Saddam's orders in 1996, after they returned from temporary exile in Jordan. Nonetheless, they fear that they could be targeted in reprisal attacks following the overthrow of Saddam's regime.
Too terrified to reveal her location, Raghad spoke to the The Telegraph through a family intermediary, who arranged for written questions to be delivered to her.
He said that it would be "awkward" for Saddam's daughters to submit themselves to the asylum process because of their previous stature in Iraq. "They are anxious about their future and worry what will happen in the coming days and weeks," he said.
Asked about their lives now that the regime has fallen, Raghad, 35, replied simply: "We are both well and in good health and so are our children, thanks be to God." She revealed that she and Rana, 33, were living together with their nine children but they were not with their mother, Sajida, who was Saddam's first wife.
The two women are not implicated in the worst excesses of the regime, even though their husbands were among Saddam's closest associates. Raghad's husband, Hussein Kamel Hassan, was a Saddam loyalist who played a prominent role in quashing the Shia rebellion following the 1991 Gulf war. Rana was married to Kamel's brother Saddam.
The brothers fled to Jordan with their wives following a bitter and prolonged rivalry with Saddam's son, Uday. Kamel supplied Western intelligence services and the UN with important information about weapons programmes.
After six months in exile, the brothers were tempted back to Baghdad with offers of clemency. Days later, they were killed in a shoot-out with security forces that was led by Uday Hussein.
"After their husbands were killed, they lived on the margins," explained the relative. "They were isolated from the family.
"It was only in the last two or three years that their mother tried to re-establish contact. They were completely loyal to their husbands. They wore the black of mourning for seven years."
Not sure. Castro's daughter is here though.
1926-, only daughter of the Soviet Communist leader Joseph Stalin and his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. After her father's death (1953), she was a teacher and translator in the Soviet Union. In late 1966, while in India, she defected to the West. She left a grown son and daughter from two earlier marriages in the Soviet Union. She settled in the United States in Apr., 1967, and published her memoirs, Twenty Letters to a Friend, (1967), and later Only One Year (1969). Becoming a U.S. citizen, she married (1970) an American architect, William Peters, but separated from him after having given birth to a daughter. She returned to the Soviet Union in 1984 and settled in Tbilisi. In 1986 she again left the USSR, returned to the United States, and during the 1990s settled in England
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